Intelligent CIO APAC Issue 18 | Page 45

CIO OPINION new systems , but in that rush forgot that costs would then be staggered over years as we moved towards an OPEX model . invoices and more . And the beating heart of all of this transformation has been the availability and scale made possible by the cloud .
CFOs suddenly got wind of this and saw costs being deferred and suddenly , many started to see cloud as more expensive in the long run , so many of us began to revert to the on-premise thinking or a hybrid of the two .
With more than 150 branches across the country , close to two thousand employees and more than a million pieces of equipment , handing the infrastructure reins to a cloud provider is simply a no-brainer .
But this reversion is something of an over-correction which only considers the costs of the service in a vacuum and doesn ’ t consider the other benefits and efficiencies that a shift to the cloud provides , many of which directly link to business outcomes and execution speed . We need to put these benefits back into our cloud calculations as these tend to get lost when we ’ re speaking dollars and cents with the business .
Transforming Coates
We have recently undertaken a transformation at Coates – we ’ re a 136-year-old business which recently began looking at the digital side of the business . We began upgrading our systems , leveraging the Internet of Things and digitizing our customer portals ,
We don ’ t need to worry about IT hardware anymore – if there is a cloud equivalent of a necessary piece of hardware , such as storage and compute , there ’ s a good chance we ’ ll use that and eschew . Sure , you all knew that , but it ’ s also the time it takes to maintain and repair that piece of hardware , physically house the
The truth is that the total cost of ownership for a cloud deployment is far less than many CIOs are calculating .
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